UK opposes international ban on ‘killer robots’

The UK is opposing an international ban on so-called “killer robots” at a United Nations conference in Geneva this week, which will examine the future of lethal autonomous weapons systems (Laws).

There is currently no
internationally agreed definition of what constitutes a lethal
autonomous weapons system and the lack of legal groundwork for
killer robots will be a main debate topic at the UN conference.
The UK is among 120 countries which will attend the Convention on
Conventional Weapons in Geneva from April 13 to 17.

The Foreign Office told the Guardian: “At present, we do not
see the need for a prohibition on the use of Laws, as
international humanitarian law already provides sufficient
regulation for this area.

“The United Kingdom is not developing lethal autonomous
weapons systems, and the operation of weapons systems by the UK
armed forces will always be under human oversight and control. As
an indication of our commitment to this, we are focusing
development efforts on remotely piloted systems rather than
highly automated systems.”

One of the main criticisms is the systems, by their nature, lack
human control. Laws are operated via computers, enabling drones
and other weapons to select targets and carry out attacks without
direct human intervention.

At the convention, complicated battlefields maps will be used to
demonstrate how difficult it could be for an automated weapon to
accurately select and distinguish targets.

Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade told RT: “The
development of killer robots is very concerning. A comprehensive,
pre-emptive prohibition on these weapons is urgently needed.
Weaponry without meaningful human control is the ultimate
expression of militarism and risks decisions about life and death
being made by machines.”

Many human rights groups have come forward to call for a legal
framework and ban on these weapons systems. Last week, Human
Rights Watch and Harvard Law School released a report calling for
the creation of a new protocol to outlaw fully autonomous
weapons.

“No accountability means no deterrence of future crimes, no
retribution for victims, no social condemnation of the
responsible party,” said Bonnie Docherty, senior Arms
Division researcher at Human Rights Watch and the report’s lead
author. “The many obstacles to justice for potential victims
show why we urgently need to ban fully autonomous weapons.”

Employment of a lethal autonomous weapons system with unknown
conserquences is likley not to be attractive to politicans -
Quintana #CCWUN

If an automated weapon were to attack a benign civilian target
due to an error in its system or mistaking a target, the owner of
the killer robot could not be held responsible because of a lack
of current legal framework.

“A fully autonomous weapon could commit acts that would rise
to the level of war crimes if a person carried them out, but
victims would see no one punished for these crimes,” said
Docherty, who is also a lecturer at the Harvard Law School
clinic. “Calling such acts an ‘accident’ or ‘glitch’ would
trivialize the deadly harm they could cause.”

Timeline of 20-30 years for development of fully autonomous
weapons seems far but they may be here much sooner - Stuart
Russell #CCWUN

Human Rights Watch is a co-founder of the Campaign to Stop Killer
Robots and serves as its coordinator. This international
coalition of more than 50 nongovernmental organizations is
calling for a pre-emptive ban on the development, production, and
use of fully autonomous weapons.